Friday, July 28, 2017

I have been saying all along that Brexit is a victory for the right. It was the obsession of parts of the Conservative Party who saw leaving the EU as the true path to paradise – either a libertarian one with a free market and a minimal state, or a nationalist heaven of restored Victorian values and imperial preference. We are in this mess purely because of their persistence and their ability to wreck the Tory party if they didn't get their way. Yet they have had fellow travellers from the other side, a dogged band of leftists from a variety of persuasions. Whether they are after creating socialism in one country or some form of nationalist socialism, the historical precedents are not pretty. Simon Wren-Lewis has superbly eviscerated the economic case they put forward here. I thoroughly agree.

"Lexit" raised its head again last Sunday as Corbyn, to the horror of trade union leaders, committed Labour to a hard Brexit, only mitigated by meaningless platitudes and erroneous suggestions about the single market, jobs, and "tariff-free" trade.

Despite having said precisely the same previously, John McDonnell rowed back once it became clear that this was kicking up a row, suggesting that Britain could stay in the single market if public opinion changed. Whether this was tactical or genuine is open to question, though it's clear Labour is as split as the Tories.

What incensed me is that Corbyn also put himself firmly in the anti-immigration camp. He blamed "wholesale" Eastern European immigration for worsening working conditions and reducing wages, particularly in the building trade. As a result, he insisted, free movement of people had to end. It was an evidence-free assertion and an ancient trope. Research points to immigration as being a net benefit, though some anecdotal accounts suggest that there may be problems at the margins (never nice if you are one of the people in that margin of course). Regardless, there are three big difficulties with his argument.

The first is that any problems are not ones of immigration, but of exploitation. To say that exploitation will cease if we stop foreigners coming into the country is risible. It blames the victims.

The second is that it's the sort of red meat that some on the middle-class left think that you have to throw at working-class people to make them like you and abandon UKIP. It's facile and condescending, but, most importantly from a left perspective, it addresses what are often described as the 'white working class' in terms of their whiteness and not of their class. It's the kind of divisive narrative socialists used to despise.

Finally, this marginal problem is not solved by dealing with the issue itself, but by removing a universal reciprocal right. His solution to exploitation in the building trade is to stop British pensioners retiring to Spain.

"Do these Brexiters ever consider how many ordinary people’s lives they have harmed?”

Does he? Do they? Johnson, Gove, Farage, and now, openly, Corbyn?

This whole farrago is the consequence of the obsessions of nonentities producing a situation that is being managed by mediocrities. As the incredible difficulty of extracting anything reasonable from increasingly difficult negotiations become ever more apparent, opinions are starting to change.

The details of the negotiations are nightmarish. The government is unprepared, divided, and has no vision of what it wants. The debate that is going on is one that should have been held before the referendum, not after invoking Article 50. There is only one reasonable option open to us – don't do it.

In the meantime, those tempted by anti-immigration rhetoric should remember that, however long ago, we are all the products of migration. It is one of the most ubiquitous experiences of humanity. We are all in its debt. George Szirtes put it magnificently.

As for refugees they are, as we were, like leaves blown off a tree, drifting where the wind or sea takes them. But not just leaves. Leaves wither and die and return to earth. Refugees, migrants of all sorts, are also seeds of new growth and always have been. Few of us present here now live in the places where we were born. We too drift and seed. On good soil with a little tending we become part of the landscape. That is our history, our present and, with luck, our future.

Monday, July 17, 2017

I haven't been blogging much lately, there have been a lot of other things going on in my life, but that isn't the main reason. I have more or less run out of things to say about the political class. It's awful. And it's tasked with managing the most complex, pointless, and utterly self-destructive policy imaginable. When you are holding a gun to your own head, the sanest thing to do is to not pull the trigger. Instead, in the words of Martin Wolf in the Financial Times,

Remember what has happened. In an unnecessary referendum, a small majority chose an option they could not understand, because it had not been worked out. Thereupon, a new prime minister, with no knowledge of the complexities, adopted the hardest possible interpretation of the outcome. She triggered the exit process in March 2017, before shaping a detailed negotiating position. Some 70 days later, in an unnecessary election, she lost both her majority and her authority.

The result is a dismal failure to even begin to negotiate the best EU deal we can hope for, which would be something merely significantly worse, rather than catastrophically worse, than what we already have.

On the first anniversary of May becoming prime minister, the tributes have been coruscating. Two stand out. John Crace, inventor of the jibe "Maybot," is cruel, funny and accurate. His conclusion:

In just a year, the Maybot had imploded entirely. It had come to this –
from being lauded as the saviour of the Conservative party to begging Labour for some policy ideas. A year in which her true mediocrity had been exposed.

On Thursday, we reached the first anniversary of Theresa May's time in
Downing Street. During this period she has pursued a hopelessly mangled
Brexit strategy, rebranded the Conservative party with hard right-wing
nativism, trashed Britain's global reputation and thrown away her own
majority in a fit of imperial arrogance. We are unlikely to have to mark
her second...

The list of her failures goes on and on. They are moral, political,
economic, strategic and presentational. She is a full-spectrum political
disaster.

Then there is Labour. When it came to the election, the result was a narrower defeat than expected, aided by the collapse of third party votes and the worst Tory campaign imaginable. Corbyn scrubbed up well. He is now dressed in expensive suits, carefully groomed, and when tieless looks preppy, rather than scruffy. He didn't lose his temper on TV, came over avuncular, but was confined mainly to mass meetings of the adoring. I still can't see any evidence that he he has the ability to be Prime Minister, but I suppose that what really gets to me is the bizarre cult of personality that has been generated around him. This worship is disturbing, it's uncritical, and every objection to his saintliness is met by a tirade of abuse. And the object of this fevered veneration is so vacuous. I mean, what has he actually said of interest? Most of his speeches are content-free rhetoric or vague promises of the impossible. Can anyone say what on earth a "jobs first Brexit" means? It's an endlessly repeated platitude worthy of Theresa May.

The weird thing is that when he says something, like wanting to leave the single market, his fan base don't believe him if it's not what they want. He is a vehicle for people's political fantasies, a symbol of being on the left, rather than the advocate of a coherent political programme. Eventually, this will be found out. Brexit is the most likely cause, but even on a flagship policy like abolishing university tuition fees, they have started rowing back expectations. I suppose being vague on Brexit is a necessary tactic, given that the party is split and the voter base is overwhelmingly pro-remain. But eventually people will begin to notice that on every Parliamentary vote on it, Labour has offered no official opposition to the policy of the Tory right.

I have always felt that Corbyn's past stance on foreign affairs made him unfit to lead the Labour Party. It hasn't turned out to be an obstacle for him as his supporters can't remember the IRA, and even if they don't share his virulent hatred of Israel, they have an antipathy to it. As for his disgusting "friends," they don't seem to make much difference either. The issue cropped up again last week when he shared a pizza with Marcus Papadopoulos, a pro-Assad denier of the Srebrenica massacre (a position Corbyn has flirted with in the past).

Corbyn is often described as a pacifist. He makes his association with peace politics known whenever possible. It sounds nice. But he isn't a pacifist. He isn't even a principled non-interventionist. No, he is an appeaser. It's a long political tradition. It was derided in the 19th Century by working class radicals as being "peace at any price." To avoid war by making concessions to a potential aggressor may be a political necessity at times, but it is morally ambiguous at best. The problem is that if you want to pretend that it is virtuous, then you have to move beyond Orwell's famous observation about pacifism being objectively pro-fascist, to being materially so. Pacifism may refuse to resist evil, but it doesn't pretend that it isn't evil. Appeasers argue that the evil actually have a case, that they are being reasonable, and that our goodwill in conceding their demands will win them over to virtue. It's wishful thinking, and from there it is a small step to become a fellow traveller, apologist, or even an outright supporter. And that's where Corbyn's Irish republicanism and anti-Zionism took him. But the association with the word peace has allowed him to effectively lie about his actions, to the ecstatic joy of his fan base.

So what can you say? In the middle of a deep, self-inflicted crisis, we have domestic politics that is reduced to a contest between Joseph and Neville Chamberlain. It is dominated by cowardice and confusion. It is organised failure. It has to change, but until it does, there is nothing more to do other than to look on in disbelief.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

They keep coming. Every day I get sent another adoring meme and article, often from idiotic sources like the Canary, glorifying the achievements of Jeremy Corbyn. I half expect to see one on his latest bowel movements - the holy turd of St Jezza - as an exemplar of his exceptional virtue. I grew up in a tradition that was sceptical of leaders and so I find this outpouring unintelligent, disturbing and nauseous.

However, not one person I know, not a single one, shared his Mirror article from 17 June. I am not surprised as most of my Corbynista friends are firmly pro-EU. Corbyn writes:

We would start by confirming that Britain is leaving the EU. The issue of Brexit is settled...Leaving the EU will mean freedom of movement will end...Leaving the European Union means Britain will have a different relationship with the single market.But jobs and the economy will be our priority, and the final Brexit deal needs to keep the benefits of the EU single market and the customs union.That means we will seek continued tariff-free access to the European market, with no new non-tariff burdens for British business.

This is mad. Ending freedom of movement means leaving the single market. If we leave the single market, then we cannot keep all the benefits of membership. This has been made perfectly clear from day one. Retaining our current benefits outside the EU is a fantasy. The best that can be hoped for is a deal that will be worse, but not catastrophically so. The only way to get a deal as good as we have currently is to remain members.

What this article is doing is not proposing a 'soft Brexit,' but using soft words to conceal a 'hard Brexit.' It's a commonplace way of arguing and isn't confined to any one political party. Two tricks are the most frequent. The first is over freedom of movement. Corbyn wrote about how it will be replaced:

In its place, we will back fair rules and reasonable management of migration, underpinned by tough action to end the undercutting of pay and conditions by unscrupulous employers and to stop overseas-only recruitment.

Notice anything missing? You probably haven't because it's rarely mentioned. Freedom of movement is a reciprocal right. It isn't just about immigration. If he said, 'in order to bring in new rules to manage immigration we will have to strip all British citizens of their right to live, work, run a business, or retire in any other EU country,' he would be telling the whole truth. But it doesn't sound quite as good does it? Confining the debate to immigration distorts the real meaning of freedom of movement. It only tells half the story.

The second is that people elide between membership of the single market and access to the single market. They are not the same thing. Access to the single market is universal. Anyone can trade into it. Sometimes the terms of trade can be made more favourable by a separate trade deal, but the full benefits are only available to members. Pretending otherwise is deceitful.

And so we are stuck within a pointless debate which all rests on the premise that a narrow majority in a poorly constructed referendum should overrule all other democratic decision making processes, because it represents the permanent and immutable will of the people for all time - even if they change their minds afterwards. This is mad. And as the benefits remain elusive, while the huge costs, the impact on people's lives, the scary economic damage, and the loss of liberties become more apparent, this premise looks more foolish by the minute.

We have a divided country. We have a divided governing party. We have a divided Labour Party trying to appease two divided constituencies of voters. Instead of dealing with realities, we have entered a world of wishful thinking where soft-sounding waffle can magic away reality. We have landed ourselves in an unconscionable mess, and I doubt whether we have a political class with enough courage and intelligence to get us out of it.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

After hubris comes nemesis. The schadenfreude of watching May's supreme confidence vanish in a cloud of platitudes was intense. Instead of oblivion, something I expected, Labour is now well placed. Corbyn has shown himself to be a proficient campaigner. Age has softened his image, if not the reality, but elections are all about smoke and mirrors and not details. Labour have had their Dunkirk; a triumphant defeat that is the basis for future victory. But beware of hubris on their part. I want to sound some notes of caution.

1. The obvious – Labour didn't win. They need 56 more seats to even catch up with the Conservatives. It was their third consecutive defeat. They are still a long way behind.

2. To make matters worse, Labour finished third in Scotland, overtaken by the Scottish Conservative Party who had been an irrelevance for decades. Even though there was a recovery for Labour, this points to fragility in its support.

3. Look at the data. This was the best share of the vote the Conservatives have had for thirty years. Yes, this Tory crisis really has been brought about by their best result since 1987. How so? Once again it's down to the arbitrariness of the electoral system. This election saw a return to predominantly two-party voting, particularly in England. The shrinking of support for minority parties has meant that the result in 2017 is more proportional to vote share than previously. If there had been any form of proportional representation in 2015, then the Tories wouldn't have had a majority to lose. The momentum may be with Labour, but the Tory base is also stronger.

4. The Labour vote, as in every election, was not homogenous. It was a coalition of different social and demographic groups, and of differing political outlooks. Though Corbyn's electoral strength was underestimated, the increased Labour vote share also includes those who voted Labour despite it being led by Corbyn.

5. The Conservatives are in control. The DUP despise Corbyn because of his republican sympathies and will always block him. Labour need the Tories to muck it up, which they are more than capable of doing of course, but they may also be shrewd at exploiting openings.

What all this points to is the need for consolidation not triumphalism. I suppose you can excuse celebrations and outbursts of idiocy, but in the end Labour have to be seen as a government in waiting.

The one great issue that a government needs to face is Brexit. It was ignored in the election, despite it being the single most significant event in the last fifty years. It's a bit like cleaning the oven, one of those jobs you keep putting off because it's too unpleasant. Parties are hiding behind the mantra that they will 'deliver the result of the referendum.' No one dares to question whether that decision was actually wise or not (or even deliverable!). Nor do they consider the dissensus rather than consensus that it produced. But what is unforgiveable is that they are completely unprepared for the complexity of the task and reluctant to acknowledge the damage it may cause. May's decision to invoke article 50 and then call an election is a monumental error. It should have been the other way round. The clock is counting down and there isn't a government to head negotiations. If we were serious about leaving, then article 50 should have been invoked only after all the preparatory work had been done.

Labour's position should be clear. Wait and seize the opportunities when they arise. Instead, the leadership went ahead and adopted the position of UKIP. Mirroring Corbyn's utterly stupid call for invoking article 50 immediately after the referendum, they have made it clear that their priority is ending free movement and thus exiting the single market. They have boxed themselves in.

Whether there is a political cost to be paid, who knows? A more sensible stance may appear. I'm not predicting anything. But it smacks of overconfidence and an underestimation of the consequences of the realities of Brexit, while failing to look over their shoulder at the uneasy coalition of voters that have raised their hopes, despite yet another defeat.

Friday, June 09, 2017

Yes, I got it wrong. Pretty comprehensively wrong. It's a talent I have.

At this point everybody who did get it wrong about the election starts writing pieces about how, although they got it wrong, the fact that they were wrong proves that they were right all along. I can't disappoint the tiny number of readers of this blog.

Over the years I have been banging on about two things. The first is the need for a new and credible left political economy to challenge orthodoxy. The time for it is now. There is an electoral coalition for the reinvention of a neo-Keynesian social democratic settlement.

More recently, I have been saying that the significant demographic divide in politics is generational. The young voted. This is a great moment of hope, because the previous assumption that there was a realignment where a left political economy was tied to social conservatism is wrong. The new generation of voters is socially liberal, pro Europe, and relaxed about immigration.

Now, some caveats.

First, I haven't changed my views of Corbyn, and especially his foreign policy and support for awful movements and regimes. They have been formed over thirty years. There is still a fight to be had over where Labour stands.

Second, this wasn't a victory for Corbyn alone. In fact it wasn't even a victory, he lost. Both the Conservative and Labour votes increased. But it is one of those moments when political change became a real possibility. And the "progressive majority" has returned. Though the country is polarised, a majority didn't vote for the right. This was a success for the Labour Party as a whole. It was a campaign fought locally as well as centrally. Right, left, and centre candidates worked hard and did well. And Labour didn't win, they came close, and they recovered amazingly from a terrible position. Think back to how bad the local election results were just a month ago! Retreating into sectarianism would throw this opportunity away.

Third, I am old. This is a bit of a bugger, but true. And like a lot of older people, I can lapse into pessimism. I don't feel like that today though. I feel that there is an opportunity now, but probably for people younger than me. But if I am old, I am younger than the leadership. This is still an interregnum. What comes next is what matters.

Finally, and this is the most important, there is Brexit. It was the reason for the election and never mentioned. This is an extraordinary constitutional and economic revolution to be undertaken with a flimsy mandate that has just been made flimsier. This is the defining issue. It has the potential to create huge damage. Where is our strategy for that? Ian Dunt put it well before the election:

It is not an elephant in the room. It is a stampede approaching at speed, to which we have stared, shrugged and continued with our little tea party. If historians do bother to assess what happened in this election they will be left aghast at our complacency.

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

The bad managers that I have worked under have generally fallen into two broad types. The first surprised you by their rise until you saw them in interview, where they were smooth, warm, and pleasant. Doubts first arose when you probed beneath the surface and found the deceits, illusions and ignorance. Then they tried to do something and everything fell apart round them, leaving a trail of exasperated staff.

The second rose effortlessly, often by default. They were suggested for posts. People thought them safe choices, solid performers; they seemed to embody stability. They had carefully hidden their lack of capacity behind all the right language and tended to be control freaks, claiming the credit for the work of others and letting little or no light fall on what they really did. They too were destructive.

Both types tend to be disloyal to their colleagues, are ambitious narcissists, and completely lack a sense of humour.

This might sound familiar. Corbyn v May. The election from hell.

Corbyn has shown his impressive qualities as a campaigner. Though he is still only really comfortable in front of large, adoring crowds, he has taken to appearing as a kindly, righteous man in front of the TV cameras. People have warmed to him. He has controlled himself when challenged; his tendency to lose his temper has been curtailed. But then interviewers rarely ask the really difficult questions. He got away with defending his dodgy past alliances with lines about being prepared to deal with people or read articles that he 'profoundly disagreed with.' Nobody followed up by asking precisely who or what he disagreed with. Imprecision permits elision.

(His real ability as a campaigner raises huge questions as to why he was so inept during the EU referendum, making me think that Alan Johnson's charge of sabotage has a great deal of merit.)

As for May, can anyone remember a worse Conservative campaign? The ruthless party of power is doing everything it can to show that it has completely lost the plot. The manifesto offered nothing. May ran on leadership and presented none. The party tried to build a cult of personality around someone bland and inarticulate who offered no human warmth. I used to think that she spoke in platitudes only because she had been trained to. Now I tend to believe that it's all she's able to do. Her stilted delivery shows her to be incapable of spontaneity.

The Conservatives will win of course. They were always going to, despite how hard they have tried to lose it. The polls are contradictory because we are seeing a huge experiment in methodology, mainly over turnout of young voters, giving disparate results. One group of polls shows a narrow Tory lead, and projections that suggest the possibility of a hung parliament. The other group shows a comfortable Conservative lead and a large majority of seats. Not one has shown a Labour lead. Every one has shown a stable Tory vote around the mid 40s, the same share of the vote that gave Thatcher and Blair landslides because of the distorting effect of the electoral system. And even if there is an unprecedentedly high turnout amongst young voters, there aren't enough of them and they are in the wrong place. The highest concentration of young voters is in constituencies that Labour already holds.

Especially early in the campaign, there were comparisons with the election of 1983, but they are false. The differences are profound. The calibre of the two leaders is a given. Foot was a man of considerably more intellectual and political accomplishments than Corbyn, while the comparison between May and Thatcher is risible. Corbyn was the wrong leader with the worst ratings, so May had a head start before she proceeded to show her own failings. But these are superficial disparities. There are three main structural differences. First, Scotland has been lost to Labour. Secondly, the third party vote has collapsed. In 1983 Labour had a three-way fight with the SDP/Liberal Alliance. Finally, it was the split in Labour that gave Thatcher the landslide. 54% of the vote went to the two centre-left parties in 1983. In 2015 something different happened. For the first time in decades more than 50% voted for the right. There is no "progressive majority." I could be wrong, but all the data points to a Tory win.

I am, and remain, Labour of course, just as I am in favour of Britain remaining in the European Union. Obviously, I am in despair about British politics at the moment. I weep at the general lack of ability of the political class. But there are things that cheer me. First, let's all celebrate the demise of UKIP. The threat of a British version of the parties of Wilders and Le Pen was real. Now, it seems to have returned to the fringes where it belongs.

Secondly, the impending death of the Labour Party has been exaggerated. It isn't healthy obviously, but there are signs of life. It has been intellectually moribund for a long while and has polarised around two nostalgias. Both are anachronistic and fictitious views of the past. The one looks back to Attlee, the other pines for the king over the water, Blair. Neither engages critically with the real history of their heroes' conflicts and failures, as well as their concrete and impressive achievements. Both are viewed selectively. Both are the past. However, this is an interregnum. Something is stirring in the parliamentary party. It's predominantly female too. This isn't down to anything specifically about gender. It's a feature of the decline of the Trade Unions and the rise of the voluntary sector as the source of candidates with a grip on reality, ready to challenge the teachers and lawyers that still dominate.

This is a real social movement. It's doing more than filling in gaps where the welfare state has eroded. It's providing advocacy and employment. There are credit unions fighting off the loan sharks, tenants' associations struggling for housing rights, community development groups, LETS schemes, social entrepreneurship, child care schemes, disability rights groups, women's refuges, the list goes on and on. They are small-scale, participatory, and hugely practical. And they are mainly staffed by women. The politically ambitious amongst them are moving into Labour politics. Their real, grass roots activism contrasts with those that think that being an activist means going to meetings and demonstrations. They are a voice for democratic decentralisation and for participatory democracy. They have roots in the real lives of working class people. I think that this is the basis of a left renewal.

Finally, the hope lies with the young. The generational divide in British politics has never been so stark. The young are overwhelmingly Labour. They are also overwhelmingly pro-EU. There is a contradiction in that Labour has implicitly committed itself to support a hard Brexit and ending free movement. But closing a door can mean different things to different people, it can lock out, but for those looking for something more, it can shut in. This has been an election about Brexit that has never mentioned it. But the realities have not yet hit. Reality tends to change the minds of all but the most ideologically committed. Brexit is an issue that Labour has dodged so far from cowardice. If it is to hold the young, then it must face it.

It's almost like finding optimism in my own demise, but I can see a new "progressive majority" emerging from a different generation. It won't look the same as the old one, but just as Labour faces an excruciating defeat, it promises relief from a bleak future.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Manchester. My adopted city, where I moved forty years ago. A city where the centre was wrecked by an IRA bomb, without casualties. Now the latest place where the most recent variant of a stupid apocalyptic cult has decided to usher in some ridiculous utopia by random killing.

Monday, May 22, 2017

I am not sure what I make of this, but Carol Cadwalladr's investigation into barely legal use of data in the EU referendum by the alt-right (which would be better described as the authoritarian right, or even pro-Putin right) is revealing. Above all, it makes it clear that Brexit was one of their central objectives. This was not just a victory for the right, but for a particularly nasty, nationalist authoritarian version.

Her reports are important because once these tactics are revealed and understood they can be countered. Macron did precisely that in the French presidential elections by confounding the Russian hackers seeking to do for Le Pen what they did for Trump.

Brexit and Trump stand as this right's peak achievements. But I'm not pessimistic. With Trump they got lucky. Despite all that was thrown at Clinton, Trump lost. He lost the popular vote significantly. They won because of the historic anomaly of the electoral college, which gave him the presidency. Trump also illustrates another weakness. His presidency is hardly a howling success. These people may be rich and clever, but they are idiots. They are clever at doing stupid things. All they need to stop them is intellectual courage and intelligence. And so I turn to Brexit ... oh.

No, I'm not as optimistic here at all. Both main parties have now committed themselves to a hard Brexit. The moment Labour declared that it would end freedom of movement (rather than use the already existing legal restrictions), political opposition ended. The right had won.

This asks real questions about the quality of both our democracy and our representatives. Cadwalladr writes:

In his blog, Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to “about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters”. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters. The referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to take a clear shot at. Or I should say US billionaires and other interested parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too.

It's ironic that the nationalist right is so globalised in its outlook, but I am concerned with something else. The referendum that supposedly displayed the 'will of the people' was determined by a mere 600,000 voters. That was how close the vote was. And this vote was allowed to overrule the opinions of the government, the opposition, Parliament, business, trade unions, economists, the United States government, the British Commonwealth, and all our strategic allies and trading partners. All wanted us to remain. Those pesky experts, eh? What's worse, this small majority is supposed to be obeyed regardless of the consequences, whatever the settlement with the EU. Brexit has to happen even if it becomes manifestly clear that the results will be, at best, damaging, or, at worst, catastrophic. This is precisely what our politicians have committed themselves to do.

This is madness. Utter madness. If we can find a viable settlement, there is a case for leaving, not that I would necessarily agree. But if not, are our political leaders really going to say, 'We will now commit suicide because you told me to'? It appears so, unless someone can find the political courage to face reality. At the moment I can see none. We will have to wait to see what events bring.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

At least that's how Peter Kropotkin would be described by sections of the left these days, even though he was a revolutionary anarcho-communist. You see, Kropotkin was one of the leading lights of the anarchist movement who supported the allies in the First World War. I have a chapter about him in this new collection. Of course it is the usual over-priced academic hardback at the moment, so nobody can afford to buy it. Though you can order it for your library.

Most of the movement was anti-war, and Kropotkin is usually condemned, but not by me. My chapter is a defence of his position. There were four main pillars to his argument.

1. France, having been invaded, had a right to self defence and should be supported. Inaction would not be neutral or promote peace, it would aid the aggressor.

2. Prussian militarism had become the organising principle of the united German state and was extremely dangerous. Kropotkin fully anticipated the war, he was expecting German aggression. He felt that if it was not destroyed completely, it would rise again in an even more virulent form.

3. The dreams of pacifists and the liberal peace movement were delusions.

4. Though he shared the socialist analysis of war in general as being the product of capitalism, he felt that, once a war had broken out, people had to make a judgement about this particular war. That meant rejecting the idea of moral equivalence, not seeking a peace that would leave the gains of the aggressor in place, and showing solidarity with the victims of aggression.

This may sound familiar. It should do, because these are precisely the arguments of the anti-totalitarian left when they grappled with the dilemmas of the wars of the early twenty-first century. Little has changed in our thinking since then.

Friday, April 21, 2017

A big, expensive legal fight was won against the government and Parliament was given a vote on moving article 50 on exiting the EU. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act was passed to stop the calling of a snap election on the basis of the government's short-term advantage. Parliament had to approve an early election by a two-thirds majority. Great, but only if the opposition doesn't decide to vote to do whatever the government wants. Parliament's power only exists if it is prepared to use it.

Now the right are consolidating their victory by holding an election to give them even greater control, presumably on the grounds that the Labour Party may not remain supine forever. 'So, Mrs May, what was it about a 21% lead in the polls that made you decide that an election was in the national interest?'

A Tory victory is a foregone conclusion. The size of the majority will depend on where the votes are cast and how effective tactical voting will be. But their lead is unassailable. The irony is that May is unimpressive at anything other than delivering platitudes. But once Miliband's ineffective leadership was replaced by Corbyn's destructive incompetence, we were doomed. It's as depressing as it was predictable (and predicted - this isn't hindsight talking).

This will be portrayed as a Brexit election. It isn't. Brexit will only become an issue when the consequences begin to unfold, but by then May will have a free hand. Although in another way, this is all about Brexit. Once again, I will have to get into the habit of agreeing with Tony Blair:

Some say it is to defeat the Tory Right so that she can go for a “softer Brexit”. This is naive. The opposite is true. At present, if she wanted to face down the Tory Right she has a Parliament with a majority to do so. What she doesn’t have is a Parliament that would vote for Brexit at any cost.

For the next couple of years Parliament will be marginalised, all the resources of government will be directed towards mitigating self-harm in the hope that the eventual deal will not be much worse than one we have already. What a criminal waste. And this is a crime which will leave many victims. One day someone will have to step in and clear up the mess, but who and when?

Monday, April 17, 2017

It's a wonderful Greek spring and I am enjoying the good fortune and privilege of being in my house in Pelion. The weather is gorgeous and the trees are in blossom. Cats are lolling about on the patio, stretching and yawning in the sun, occasionally to wake up and insistently demand food.

But there is a cloud on the horizon. At the moment I can come here as often as I like, when I like and as for as long as I like. For some reason, a number of my fellow Brits have decided that my right to do so should be taken away from me. My liberty and that of many others is down to my status as a citizen of the European Union and we are in the process of leaving as a result of a political miscalculation. So please don't tell me to move on, or sneer at me as a "remoaner." Depending on the final settlement, Brexit could hit me hard. I would love to see our departure stopped. It's personal.

Though this isn't just about me. I am upset by the referendum itself for constitutional and political reasons as well. Plebiscites are crude distortions of democracy. The mandate is weak, the majority was slim, and the outcome is highly uncertain, all of which should caution against change, rather than launch us recklessly into it. But above all, as I have been going on about for ages, Brexit is unambiguously a victory for the right.

However you look at it, this is not a win for the left, despite those who are optimistic about what they call a "lexit." Leftists who want to leave tend to make two main arguments. The first is that this was a working class revolt.

Since the Brexit vote, the 48% who sought to remain have been demonised as a privileged elite attempting to subvert an authentic working-class revolt. “The working class have spoke!” crowed multimillionaire American citizen John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, recently. The referendum was a clash between the angry “millions of working-class people” and “prosperous middle-class homeowners in London”, declared the Sun. “Remoaners” are a clique formed of “citizens of the world” conspiring against the patriotic British working class, or so the story goes.

The only trouble with this is that, as Jones has spotted, it isn't true.

While Fareham is cast as part of an anti-establishment vanguard, Tower Hamlets – which has prevalent child poverty and two-thirds of whose residents voted for remain – is subsumed into the caricature of a pampered liberal elite. Most working-class Britons under 35 opted for remain, while most middle-class people over 65 voted for leave. Most working-class people who are white went for leave, most working-class people from ethnic minorities went for remain. Consider that the next time the Brexit press imposes its simplistic narrative on a complicated reality. Applying their logic, black supermarket workers and young apprentices form part of the privileged remoaner elite.

Reality is much more complex.

The second argument is based on economics. Forgetting the left's earlier attraction to the idea of 'social Europe' and the European Social Chapter of the Maastrict Treaty, they contend mainly that the EU is a vehicle for the imposition of right-wing economic orthodoxy, regardless of democratic demand, throughout the continent. This isn't without reason and there is nowhere better to see it than in Greece.

The crisis here rumbles on. There are small signs of recovery, but the social costs of austerity are ever-present. Greece's scope for action is limited by membership of the Euro and the flawed construction of the single currency. However, once again, real Greece is not the country of the left's imagination. Growing Greek indebtedness over decades would have resulted in a financial crisis whatever. Endemic corruption, clientelism, and the mess that is the Greek state, with its tangled bureaucracy, are obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in the country. Greeks despair of the system. If it was to avoid economic collapse, Greece would always have needed structural reforms together with the large additional loans, coupled with debt write offs, that it has received from the IMF and EU institutions.

The problem has always been the macro-economic conditions required by by the lenders. They have plunged the country into a deep recession, a spiral from which it struggles to emerge. Keynesians predicted as much. The institutions have been misguided. But would Greece have got a better deal from anyone else? No way. The problem is the global economic consensus. Of course the EU's economic assumptions are based on it. It's a consensus after all. This is what needs to be challenged.

So rather than disengage, wouldn't it be better to support the social democratic left's work to change the EU from within? Well, part of the "lexit" narrative is that the EU cannot, and never will, change. This is an odd contention to make about a dynamic institution that has transformed itself from a coal and steel community of six countries, to a loose union of twenty-eight democratic nations, some with a new common currency, in only sixty years. And again it isn't true. Here are a couple of examples of the type of left thinking taking place in the EU. Wolfgang Kowalsky thinks change is back on the agenda after a hiatus and that we are heading towards a more flexible approach to integration. Whilst Prime have produced a research paper with constructive proposals for a democratic economic policy. Instead of getting involved, leavers on the left have chosen disengagement, which suggests that their nationalism is stronger than their socialism.

No, the right have won. Labour is collapsing into irrelevance, twenty points behind in the polls and supporting Brexit, leaving the half of the country that wanted to remain in the EU without representation. A Conservative hegemony, deeply wedded to economic orthodoxy, stretches ahead of us. The right have succeeded in consolidating power and building their electoral strength. They have had three main successes.

First, they managed to get the referendum held despite the huge indifference of the British electorate. There was no demand for a referendum. Outside a small group of obsessives, nobody was bothered. All opinion polling had Europe as one of the lowest salience issues as this chart makes clear:

People who had never thought about the EU or took our membership as a given were forced to take a position.

Secondly, the right were successful in mobilising opinion because they linked a low salience issue with one with much higher salience, immigration. And in doing so they legitimised a popular xenophobia. Just as the left has had a tin ear for the anti-Semitism in its midst, so the left leavers are resistant to the evidence that popular racism had much to do with the win. They cannot hear what outsiders find loud and concerning. This is one reason why reading some of the polemics of the poet George Szirtes is so illuminating. As a former child refugee he has the ear of the incomer to hear the whispers of the ghosts of the past that the EU was created to lay to rest. This essay is fabulous.

I don’t think demonisation is too harsh a word, in that Leave rhetoric called forth certain demons, or rather that it quite consciously opened the trapdoors where such demons were hiding. It legitimised them. It called forth the firebombers. It called forth those who immediately set upon elderly widows of French and German birth who had lived in the country for decades and taunted them by asking when they were going home. It called forth the teenagers on the Manchester tram who demanded a black American get off it. It called forth the murderer of Jo Cox.

Whatever some politicians say, we are citizens of the world whether we admit it or not. We consume and live by that which was once strange and once we close doors and windows we begin to suffocate. The terms in which the EU referendum was conducted extended far beyond normal debate about the movement of peoples, whether refugees or poor workers seeking a better life. They sought and exploited a latent hostility towards the foreign, a hostility that has increased since the decision. What this can lead to is more than a lack of air. It is a kind of aridity that becomes combustible. A few sparks can do it. The conditions for combustibility are already in place in the UK and in other parts of Europe, particularly in the region where I was born, and – especially now – in Trump’s US. Isolationism and patriotism are on the rise, partly as political acts, partly as social mood, exacerbated by whatever means, for political reasons.

Drop enough sparks on dry ground and a fire starts. We have seen such fires before. The view beyond the cell, as Vas put it, is vital: better still to get out of the cell and out into the fertile world, and become its citizen.

I know that focus group research is plagued by the possibility of sample error, but this is alarming:

When asked what level they would expect to see for immigration after Brexit, the views of leave voters are clear: "zero"; "immigration should be stopped"; "no more East European immigrants"; "as low as it can possibly go".

And what happens when these totally unrealistic expectations are not met? Will there be an embittered constituency waiting for something more extreme?

This brings me to my final point. Brexit was our alt-right moment. If you are in any doubts read this profile of Arron Banks.

OK, there are many sincere eurosceptic leavers on both the left and right who want nothing to do with this stuff. Also, UKIP and Leave.eu were not the official campaign, though they probably tipped the balance. But Brexit will be hugely disruptive, and disruption is what the alt-right seek to provide the opportunity to lead us into some dark places.

I don't think that they can do it on their own, as Jan-Werner Müller argues in this article right-wing populists need mainstream allies to win. This is what the official Brexit campaign provided in the referendum, but only for the limited purpose of leaving the EU. Their aim is more ambitious, to break up the EU completely. It stands in their way, and particularly in the way of the authoritarian anti-democratic movement. Wilders, Le Pen, Orban, Kaczynski all see themselves as the future and Brexit as a model to follow.

The power centre of this authoritarian and illiberal right is Putin. He has long had his band of faux-left figures, 'useful idiots' like Greenwald, Pilger, and Assange cheering him on, but could more effective alliances be forged in the mainstream? The pro-Trump sycophancy shown by Michael Gove is alarming, but I don't think it will go much further. What has happened though is that this utterly distasteful politics has shaped the agenda in ways I would not have thought possible before.

It's not a happy prospect for our country. Amongst some of the left, nationalist arguments over sovereignty and an economic critique of neoliberalism have combined with the dishonest reporting of the tabloid press to produce a fictional view of the EU as a static bureaucratic monolith, rather than an evolving supra-national organisation and alliance of democracies. We are not only leaving the EU, we are abdicating our responsibilities and abandoning our allies who are attempting to shape the Union and challenge economic orthodoxy. Instead we are retreating into a Tory hegemony, while left leavers dream of social democracy in one country. I rather think that a left turn is more likely within the EU than in Britain.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

The referendum was called to disarm UKIP and the obsessive right of the Tory Party, and by doing so to secure our place in the EU for good. That went well didn't it?

It might have just about worked until the leavers played the race, sorry, immigration card.

Not that there is a consensus. The majority was small, subsequent polling all points to the country being split half and half, while up to 100,000 people marched through London to demonstrate against Brexit last weekend. Never can a change as fundamental as this have been implemented on such a weak mandate.

A Prime Minister who campaigned to remain has started the process, supported by an opposition who campaigned to remain, and with the backing of a vote in Parliament, the majority of whose members consider this to be an act of folly. The principles of representative democracy have been abandoned.

To be fair, if all goes well in negotiations, given enough expertise (which we don't have), given plenty of time (which we don't have), given adequate experienced staff (which we don't have), and given politicians who know what they are doing (which we don't have), we might just about get away with a deal that is only slightly worse than the one we already have as members. Otherwise, the risks are huge. This is a change that hasn't be thought through and for which we are entirely unprepared. There wasn't even any contingency planning.

I can't help thinking that this is a colossal, reckless error and, even worse, a betrayal of the future of the younger generation who voted overwhelmingly - in all classes and all regions - to remain. This is the generation who will have to bear the costs and lose the opportunities they had expected, which have been taken away from them against their will.

Monday, March 20, 2017

"If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring," as the old song goes. Well, it's the first day of spring today. The clouds are low, a cold wind is blowing, and the rain is slashing down. The singer wants every day to be like this? Really? Of course the symbolism of the first day of spring is that it marks the end of winter and the promise of summer to come. So, the song offers us a promise never to be fulfilled. Oh joy.

Come on Ryley, it's only a song. But it got me thinking. It comes from the musical Pickwick and is a political speech, a manifesto sung by Samuel Pickwick, an ingenue mistaken for a political candidate. Perhaps it's rather an apt metaphor.

The question it raises is, 'when is it right for people to impose their will on others?' Quite clearly, I want every day to be mid summer. I don't want to be condemned to live the rest of my life in vile weather like today. There isn't a simple answer. The current fashion seems to be that the majority, however small, of voters in a referendum have the right to impose their will on everybody else.

I moan about having my EU citizenship being taken away from me against my will, Scottish independence is being raised again, but one of the worst aspects of the EU referendum is that EU citizens, legally resident in the country for many years, didn't even have a vote. They are at risk of losing everything and weren't allowed a voice. Others took away their automatic right to live here and now they can only rely on others to try and protect them. As for Gibraltar, the forgotten question, around 90% of its citizens voted to stay in the EU. This is because their entire economy is dependent on an open border with Spain, guaranteed by membership. Yet, they are to be wrenched out of the EU by the votes of people in England. I could go on and on.

This isn't just a question about Brexit, though I think it is a terrible mistake, it is about the nature of government and democracy. It is why I would always defend representative democracy against a plebiscitary alternative. I am not an individualist absolutist. There are clear cases when people's ideas and desires should be overruled for the collective good, but the mechanisms for doing so matter.

I don't have good answers for a blog post. While the case against vesting all power in a dictatorial ruler or an oligarchy is manifest, crude majority rule also has dangers and is a flawed model of democracy. In the meantime, roll on summer.

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About Me

This is the work avoidance strategy and ego trip of Peter Ryley, who has just retired, despite being far too young, from working in lifelong learning, latterly at the University of Hull, and from teaching part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University. I live partly in Manchester and the rest of the time in Pelion, Greece. I continue to research and write on the history of Anarchism, and have frequent rants about the importance and current parlous state of adult education.